Is a world-class fighter automatically good at protecting themselves from violence? No!

On May 16th of this year, the incredibly dangerous martial artist Urijah Faber fought the incredibly dangerous martial artist Frankie Edgar at UFC Fight Night 66. In this excellent fight we discovered once and for all whether Edgar’s fantastic sense of shootboxing timing and peerless cardio were up to the task of defeating the durability, veteran experience and whip-smart submissions of Faber.

They’re both ex-champions of the highest calibre. To me this was one of the most interesting matches of the year, and the best match that either fighter had been involved in since Edgar’s (debatable) points defeat at the hands of Featherweight champ Jose Aldo in February 2013.

On watching this fight my mind was drawn back to Faber’s style and his history. One well-publicized incident stands out as a worthy topic for an educational blog post: We’re going back a way here; back to the late noughties. In approximately June 2006, whilst on holiday on the island of Bali, Indonesia, Faber was involved in a serious street brawl in the popular tourist night-spot, Kuta.

The short version of the story is: Faber was out clubbing in Kuta, when a local man started being aggressive towards him. Faber offered the man outside, and the two fought hand-to-hand. Faber won (of course), but after he had incapacitated his opponent, his opponent’s friends (presumably, although total strangers have been known to start beating on a combatant even though the situation is nothing to do with them personally) jumped Faber, attempting to beat him, and inflicting at least some serious damage before Faber managed to escape. Also, Faber himself claims that innocent bystanders were hurt in the scuffle.

Reactions following this were mainly in two categories: either expressing admiration for Faber for “stepping up” and taking on a group of assailants in an unfamiliar land, or secondly lambasting Faber for failing to defeat all the opponents, and “wimping out” and running away.

Predictably, both of these groups of commentators missed the point of the whole debacle entirely.

The sensible person does not listen to the story Faber told and conclude “wow, Faber’s one tough son of a gun!”, nor that “Wow, Faber’s a wuss in real life!”. Instead, what can we sensible people learn from Faber’s experience? Not “how to fight”. But when and even more importantly why not to fight.

From a self-defence perspective, Faber made a few serious errors that evening:

The first error was staying out to party by himself in a foreign and unfamiliar land when his friends retired for the evening. But I don’t judge Faber too harshly for this error. It’s easy for an average unfit and untrained person to let his or her ego tell them that they can stay out and have fun, and that they’ll be able to “take care of themselves”. Men and women do it every weekend, all over the world. And some, sadly, pay the price for it. How much easier is it for a former world champion cage fighter to delude himself in this fashion? After all, at least Faber had extensive past experience and evidence of his own prowess.

His second error was to initiate violence. Not aggression, as- at least by Faber’s account- the man he initially fought had started the cycle of aggression through his visual and verbal engagement… but Faber most definitely escalated the situation to the physical by inviting the man outside for a fight. This error I do judge Faber harshly for. Not only is it a deliberate act specifically designed to make oneself less safe, but also as a trained martial artist, and a supposed professional in his field, Faber has a greater- not a lesser- responsibility to safeguard himself and others… even his potential opponents. Seneca said it best when he opined:

Faber should feel shame for challenging anyone to a fight in the real world. He not only endangered himself by doing so, but he endangered others as well; Faber states that a girl in the club he was partying at was injured during the “mini riot” his actions led to.

Thirdly, by his own account, Faber stuck around after the initial fight too long. After incapacitating his foe, without hurrying, he stopped to collect his belongings before leaving the scene for up to four minutes. It is very close to being the number one rule of self-defence that after ANY kind of altercation, be it physical, verbal or even some purely body-language related conflicts, one should leave the area immediately. Not four minutes later. Not even one minute later. Immediately. If Faber had done this, despite his earlier major errors, he would have avoided the subsequent gang attack.

The last… or maybe the actual first… or the generally overarching error Faber made was to forget (or just wilfuly disregard the fact) that fights in the real world are rarely one-on-one, and are never “fair”. A fight in the real world is not like a fight in a boxing ring or MMA cage. There’s always the risk that additional parties will involve themselves in the fracas; there is the omnipresent risk of concealed weaponry; there are hazardous objects and surfaces which can cause death if one falls onto them headfirst; there is no-one to save you or stop the fight if you end up losing; and there can be serious long-term legal consequences and risks of revenge attacks months or even years later.

It is quite simply never worth the risk to invite a fight in the real world, as even the most “friendly” fight between friends or siblings can lead to accidental death in the real world. It doesn’t matter how tough or skilled you are. You will NEVER be as tough and as skilled as you would need tobe to come out of 100% of street fights unscathed. That person does not exist, and never has nor ever will exist.

And lastly the fact is that in an alcohol-fuelled environment, especially if we have been drinking ourselves, we are as vulnerable as we will probably ever be in our adult lives, (barring the time we spend actually sleeping). If Faber had sat down before his evening out and specifically designed his evening so as to completely offset and make worthless his years of training and physical conditioning, he could not have done better than to:

-go to an unfamiliar place full of drunken revellers and get pissed,
-carry on partying alone when his friends leave,
-challenge an aggressive man to a fight,
-and stick around for a few minutes after defeating the man.

Maybe if he’d worn a sign around his neck with “I hate Indonesia” written on it…

What did Faber’s little tale teach us? Well he may be a hell of a martial artist… But he’s a TERRIBLE exponent of basic self-defence. And in this respect, he’s shown us vividly the separation between the two disciplines. You can have zero martial arts experience and be better at self-defence than a world champion fighter. Likewise, you can be one of the greatest martial artists in the world, and be apparently totally incapable of performing the most basic actions to ensure your safety from violence.

Keep this in mind while you train… and/or while not training… and it will serve you better than a UFC career in terms of learning real self-defence.

]]>https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/urijah-fabers-trouble-in-bali/feed/1withoutwritingIs a world-class fighter automatically good at defending themselves from harm? No!Voting in UK Elections – 38 Degrees Addresses Parliamentary Committeehttps://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/voting-in-uk-elections-38-degrees/
https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/voting-in-uk-elections-38-degrees/#respondFri, 21 Mar 2014 21:43:22 +0000http://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/?p=482]]>I have just become aware of 38 Degrees, a campaigning organisation based in the UK. This organisation polls people on the internet as to what campaigns it should run, runs those campaigns, and obtains content and then feedback from its members relating to these campaigns.

Well done them.

Now, in the UK, voting turnouts are extremely low, historically speaking. My guess, personally, is that this state of affairs does not really worry those who hold power in the UK. In fact, the voting turnout has little or no effect on their ability to retain their current power under the current electoral system.

Yesterday (the 20th of March 2014), a representative of 38 Degrees, a Mr David Babbs, addressed the parliamentary committee in question. True to form, 38 Degrees polled its members on what Mr Babbs should say during the committee meeting in the days running up to the meeting.

My view is that Mr Babbs did a really good job on behalf of his members. Naturally the politicians in the committee- even those who were relatively progressive and/or relatively sympathetic to 38 Degrees’ statements- simply couldn’t or wouldn’t grasp the implications of what Mr Babbs was relaying to the committee.

In short, from what Mr Babbs was saying, it was clear that 38 Degrees members stated that they did not feel listened to, respected or engaged by the politicians who were supposed to be representing them. They felt that these Members of Parliament were not, in fact, working for them, but were working for someone else, be that someone else their political party, corporate donors, etcetera. They also felt that voting was a waste of time… even those who stated that they intend to vote in the next election.

In short, Mr Babbs relayed what most people on the street, in your workplace or in your family unit will tell you about politics. Nothing very revolutionary about that… It’s also the truth:

In the UK we live in a Schumpeterian “Representative Democracy”… in other words, a fake democracy. A frankly unconvincing parody of a democracy. Every few years, a slice of the UK populace- those who can be bothered- go to their local polling stations and- predominantly- tick either the red, blue or yellow box (Labour, Tory or LibDem) on the ballot sheet. They usually know nothing about the people they’re voting for, much less know what these candidates stand for as individuals.

Even if they know the prospective Member of Parliament personally and know them to be a moral person, the candidate’s political party affiliation will usually define what they vote for when it comes down to it. Labour candidates will end up voting for policies determined by the Labour Party leadership, etcetera. So knowledge about the candidate is actually irrelevant anyway.

All three major political parties have proved themselves to be wayyyy to the right of the general population of the UK on issues like war, healthcare and finance. Both Labour and Tory governments have dragged us into unpopular and perpetual wars. All three parties are in favour of cuts to healthcare, welfare and national financial austerity. The majority of the population of the UK isn’t in favour of any of these things. So whatever candidate you elect with your vote is likely to end up supporting things you don’t want and don’t agree with.

The majority of the politicians who live in these parties are middle aged white men, usually ex professionals e.g: lawyers, journalists, corporate executives, etcetera. Totally unrepresentative of the majority of the denizens of the UK, and unfamiliar with- and uninterested in- the views of the common person. So whatever candidate you elect is unlikely to think the same way as you, understand your problems or care about solutions to your problems.

So who will you vote for? Why should you vote for them? Perhaps Labour is the lesser of two evils… but it’s not much less evil really, is it? Oh sure, you could make a protest vote and waste your pencil mark on the Green Party (as much as I’m sympathetic to the Green Party’s policies, mind you), or you could be a crypto-racist tosser and vote for UKIP, aka BNP-Lite… but it will make little difference in the long run. A sad state of affairs indeed.

In fact, a real democracy would consist of a system in which the population DECIDE the policies, and then a set of administrators implement those policies. Not “leaders”. Merely facilitators.

The questions that the members of this parliamentary committee asked Mr David Babbs were suitably foolish and self-centred. They variously asked things like:

– How can 38 Degrees ask better questions of its members?
– How can 38 Degrees work better with us, the politicians?
– How can 38 Degrees make its members stop bothering us?
– And the disgusting fatuous Tories on the committee of course just resorted to slinging insults and disparaging those that filled out the questionnaires that 38 Degrees sent to them, and haranguing Mr Babbs in a most childish fashion.

They did not ask “what can we do to make our constituents feel more engaged”? because the answer would have been “engage them.” They did not ask “what can we do to make our constituents feel more represented?” because the answer would have been “Represent them.”

To his credit, Mr Babbs told them these answers anyway, even though they didn’t ask. Well done to him, my hat is off to him. Purely on the basis of this performance he seems intelligent, polite, well-meaning and seriously committed to representing those who donate content to 38 Degrees. And more importantly, he faced off well against these privileged politicos, on their home ground.

Now I’m off to sign up to 38 Degrees. If their campaigns result in fun like this, that alone makes them worth participating in.

On the 4th of August 2011, an unarmed man named Mark Duggan was shot to death by armed police in Tottenham, London, in the UK. His death was the incident that- added to many previous injustices and ills visited upon the small urban area by those in positions of power- triggered city-wide rioting and looting.

It has taken over two years for an inquest into his death to be completed, and a verdict to be delivered. The details of the case teach us a great deal about how our police force functions, and the verdict tells us a lot about the law, whom the law is designed to protect, and how society regards these things.

Yesterday, the inquest into Mr Duggan’s killing delivered the following verdict: Though they rejected the claims of some police officers that Mr Duggan had been armed at the time of the shooting, they stated that his killing was a “lawful killing”. This has provoked a storm of incredulous protest from Mr Duggan’s family and supporters of his family.

By itself, the verdict merely confirms the current state of affairs in the UK: that it is legal for police officers to shoot someone to death when the balance of probability is that they do NOT pose a lethal threat to the police, or to anyone. Here’s why I say that:

The Facts of the Case:

The facts of the case are as follows, and are effectively uncontested:

1. The police state that they suspected Mark Duggan of being a gang member, and state that they had suspected him of many and varied serious and violent crimes in the past.

2. Mr Duggan had never been convicted of any serious crime. He had never been sent to prison, nor had he ever been given a community-based sentence. His most serious crime, for which he was fined a grand total of £250, was “receiving stolen goods” in 2007. In an impoverished area like Tottenham, such convictions are commonplace and do not prove much about a person’s real character.

3. The police state that they believed that Mr Duggan was on his way to obtain a gun from a known drug-dealer. This could have been for various purposes if true; a person can hold a gun for a criminal to protect them, or they can wish to use the gun themselves, or deliver a gun to a third party for either of the previous reasons.

4. The police never actually saw or photographed Mr Duggan in possession of a gun at the alleged exchange point, but only observed him receiving a shoebox, which the police state they believed contained a gun.

5. The police forcibly pulled over the taxi in which Mr Duggan was a passenger, and Mr Duggan exited the vehicle when armed police approached.

6. And here’s where the accounts start to diverge. The policeman who shot Mr Duggan claims that he saw a gun in Mr Duggan’s hand. One eyewitness stated that it was clearly a mobile phone.

7. An armed policeman shot Mr Duggan twice. Once in the arm, and once in the chest. Mr Duggan died from these gunshot wounds. One of the bullets fired hit another policeman in his radio, lodging there.

8. No gun was found on or near Mr Duggan.

9. Following the shooting, the police state they conducted a search of the area. An unfired gun which was not ready to fire, with no fingerprint or DNA evidence on it, inside a sock, was found over a fence six metres from where Mr Duggan died.

10. The police claim that Mr Duggan must have thrown this gun over the fence when he realised he would be caught. The jury agreed with this claim, judging that it was likely that Mr Duggan threw the gun out of the window of the moving taxi before it was stopped by police. At least one eyewitness, on the other hand, states that the police must have planted the gun. Initially, the Independent Police Complaints Commission reported that several policemen at the scene had testified that the gun had been thrown over the fence by a policeman. This report was later retracted by the IPCC, for unknown reasons.

11. After this killing, the police force via the IPCC told the press that Mr Duggan had not only had a gun, but had fired on officers prior to being shot himself. This was a lie. The only policeman who was shot at the scene was shot by another policeman.

12. The IPCC themselves effectively tampered with the crime scene by approving that the cab that Mr Duggan had been travelling in was to be moved away from the crime scene, and then returned some time later. Stafford Scott, one of the members of the local community liaising with the IPCC investigation, gives a fascinating account of how ridiculously tainted the investigation was, here.

“In all of my years of engagement with the Met, I have yet to witness such a shoddy investigation. It is time we recognise that we need a body truly willing and able to investigate the police.”
– Stafford Scott (Link)

The Verdict:

Many people are angry about this verdict. They should be angry. The case itself is deeply suspicious to anyone who knows much about the history of police misconduct, deaths in custody and extra-judicial violence by police. But in the main the irate public don’t seem to understand that the problem was less with the verdict, and more with the legislation that inevitably led to the verdict. They seem to be unaware that there is actually no law against armed policemen killing unarmed people in the course of their duties, per-se. That is to say, an armed policeman can shoot someone without any penalty at all, as long any old random person… or another policeman happens to have told the police that their victim might have a weapon on them at the time.

The reason that the verdict of Lawful Killing was delivered by the jury in the recent inquest… and the reason that it was- sadly- the only verdict they were ever likely to return, is that the officer who shot and killed Mr Duggan claimed that he believed Mr Duggan was holding a gun, and was about to use it to shoot the police who had confronted him.

As can be seen from the instructions given to the jury, they were effectively instructed to treat the police officer as someone who has committed violence in self-defence. In other words, if the policeman claimed- as in fact he did- that he believed that Mr Duggan had a gun and was about to shoot, the jury would effectively have to have concluded that the policeman was consciously lying in order to find his behaviour- and therefore the killing itself- unlawful.

Even if eight to ten jury members had been found who had a sufficient mistrust of the police to make such a judgement, a decision of unlawful killing would have almost certainly been overturned- as it was in previous comparable cases- at judicial review, to be replaced by either a verdict of lawful killing, or the more nebulous “open verdict”.

Conclusion: As soon as the policeman who shot Mr Duggan claimed that he honestly believed he and his colleagues were in danger of being shot, he, his colleagues and the police force as a whole were safe from any legal ramifications of his action.

But one question suggests itself: Even if the policeman’s belief was honestly held (which isn’t at all certain), was it a reasonable belief? Is it reasonable to shoot an unarmed person- a person who had never been convicted of a serious violent crime- just because you think they might have a gun, even when you have not seen a gun at any point during surveillance of the suspect? Is it reasonable for a policeman to assume that a man who has never been convicted of a violent crime will suddenly become murderous and suicidal, and to demonstrate this by waving a gun at armed police? Is it reasonable for a specially trained professional firearms officer to confuse a small mobile phone with a gun wrapped in a sock? You be the judge.

A Brief History of Some Dodgy Police Killings

Some people’s attitude to the Duggan inquest verdict consists of the poorly reasoned: “Hurr, if you’re a gangster you’ll get shot innit, what’s all the fuss about?”

My response to these people would be: Firstly, innocent until proven guilty, motherf***er. The police have been allowed by the press and the judiciary to use their own unproven suspicions to justify their own actions in this case, which is frankly ludicrous. Secondly, the police don’t just do this kind of thing to people they suspect of being gangsters. For example:

– He was carrying a recently repaired table leg in a bag at the time of his death.
– He was not engaged in any criminal endeavour at the time.
– The police stated that they had received an anonymous tip that an “Irishman with a gun wrapped in a bag” had been seen in the area.
– The police approached Mr Stanley from behind, shouted to him, and when he turned to face them, they immediately shot him dead.

The officers involved got away with this killing, because they claimed- just as the Duggan killer claimed- that they had an honestly held belief that they were about to be fired upon by Mr Stanley. And because of the anonymous tip mentioning a gun, they got away with this.

Additionally it’s worth noting that an open verdict was recorded by the inquest jury in this case, was appealed by the family and changed to a verdict of unlawful killing, but was then appealed again by police, and the verdict was finally changed back to an open verdict, which it remains to this day.

In the days following the famous July 7th bombings in London, Police mistook Mr Menezes for a terrorism suspect. Several armed officers pursued him onto an underground train at Stockwell station, pinned him down without identifying themselves as police, and shot him eight times in the head. He had no backpack, nor any tool belt which might have concealed a bomb. The police lied repeatedly to the public following this killing, variously claiming that there was no CCTV footage of the incident available from station cameras, that they had identified themselves as police when confronting Menezes, that Menezes had run away from them, and that he had jumped over station ticket barriers rather than using a ticket, thus raising suspicion. All of these claims were later established to be utter lies, through CCTV footage, photographic evidence and eyewitness testimony.

The police tried their best to manipulate the investigation into the shooting. Senior police officers even personally lobbied members of parliament to attempt to influence the outcome. This is outrageous behaviour by any measure.

An open verdict was recorded at the inquest into Mr de Menezes death, though the police service were fined for failing in their “duty of care” to Mr Menezes. In other words, we the public paid a fine for a killing perpetrated by police on one of our own.

***

Azelle Rodney was shot without legal justification by police in 2005. He was in a car with suspected drug dealers, but was not armed nor seen to be armed when he was shot six times in the face and chest by an armed policeman after the car had been forced off the road by police vehicles. The killer stated that “Everything about [Azelle Rodney’s] actions led me to believe that he was fully ready to fire with a fully automatic weapon.”, which is effectively the same defence used by the police in all the above cases, very much to their benefit.

Unusually, this year a verdict was delivered stating that Mr Rodney’s death had no legal justification. But let’s see how long that verdict stands if it’s appealed by the police.

***

James Ashley was unarmed and naked in his own flat when he was shot to death without warning by armed police who had crept into his home in the dead of night in 1998. Police hoped to find large amounts of drugs in the flat, but in the end only found a small amount of harmless cannabis.

Grave statements were made by independent investigators about police conduct during and following this incident, and indeed, one senior officer resigned as a result. But the policemen who entered Mr Ashley’s flat and shot him dead continued to serve as officers, and in fact sued the force themselves for what they regarded as the terrible psychological trauma they had suffered. This was a farce. A bad joke.

Once again, the only substantial result from the investigation of this case is that the family of Mr Ashley received compensation, therefore the public were effectively left holding the bill; paying for a killing perpetrated by the police.

***

These cases and many others highlight the fact that the problem with the Duggan case isn’t related to his alleged criminal background at all, because such things have happened to totally innocent people time and time again in the past. Instead, it’s a problem relating to the rights and responsibilities given to police officers.

Rights and Responsibilities of the Police

The core of the problem with the laws relating to police violence, and armed police shootings especially, is that policemen sent out onto the streets and into people’s homes are given the same rights to self-defence as- say- a homeowner defending his or her home from armed invasion are given.

If you find an intruder in your bedroom and whack them with a hammer, killing them, you can claim that you had a genuine and reasonable belief that they were likely to harm or even kill you. This will allow you to use a self-defence argument in court, and will help that argument succeed. Likewise after shooting someone to death in their own home, or on a public street, a policeman can claim that they had a genuine and reasonable belief that the victim was likely to harm or kill them (or others), without having to offer any modicum of additional evidence to support their claim.

The ludicrousness should be obvious; self defence laws are in place to protect ordinary untrained people thrust into situations not of their own making, who have to make snap judgements about saving their lives or the lives of their loved ones. But armed police on the other hand are only ever sent into situations where firearms or other dangerous weapons have been reported to be in play, or are likely to be in play. This is therefore not an unexpected situation thrust upon an unsuspecting policeman minding his own business, it is a planned engagement where risks are known beforehand. We should expect a greater degree of care and circumspection from armed police, than we expect from a man who finds a stranger in his bedroom. At the very least, we should expect that the policeman will give a suspect the time to drop a gun, if indeed they even have a gun, before opening fire. This did not happen in any of the above cases, and police are not legally bound to give such time before opening fire.

This is not to say that police men and women should have fewer rights than members of the public, but merely that they should have different rights. In the same way that corporations were given some of the same rights as individual members of the public, and this has (predictably) resulted in monstrous injustice and inequality, giving police the same rights as average members of the public when it comes to self defence is predictably going to result in the following (current) situation:

Armed police are only sent out to situations where firearms or other dangerous weapons may be present.

Armed police therefore can always claim that they have a legitimate and earnest belief that they’re about to be shot/blown up/whatever.

This means that Armed police always have a self-defence plea ready-made, whenever they’re sent out on a call, regardless of what happens during the callout.

In the press, there has only been roughly one police-related death every year for the past few years reported which might be compared to the Duggan case. This is a small number, to be sure. But for every police-related death which is obviously dodgy, there are many police-related deaths that are dodgy, but less obviously so. And for every death, there are many non-fatal beatings and injuries that are dodgy. And for every beating, there are many arrests that are dodgy. And the police routinely get away with this by claiming “self defence”, no matter how ludicrous the claim might be, as in this case of the G20 protester hit by a police thug. This continues in major part because the burden of proof is always on the public to prove conscious and intentional misconduct on the part of the police. And proving that is nearly impossible at this time, as long as the police involved stick to their cover stories.

This is not the police force, nor the legislation, I want.

I want armed police to be forced to give people time to recognise them and even if they’re holding a gun at the time, to give the person time to drop said gun before blowing their face off.

More broadly, I want a police force made up of people who are willing to take reasonable risks to ensure that they don’t shoot, or beat, or harm, or arrest the wrong person.

And I want the claims of “self defence” given by police to be held to a higher standard of scrutiny than self defence claims made by members of the public.

I want the responsibility of the police to protect the public, even those they suspect of committing a crime, to trump their trigger-happy desire to punish and dominate. And I want that to be supported by robust law.

After all, the police are meant to serve the public interest, not merely the interests of the corporate state and their own juvenile gung-ho impulses.

Isn’t that the kind of thing we bloody well pay them for?

]]>https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/mark-duggans-death-and-the-inquest-verdict/feed/0withoutwritingOur beloved and totally trustworthy protectors... pshawBruce Lee vs Chuck Norris: The Real Truthhttps://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/bruce-lee-vs-chuck-norris-the-real-truth/
https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/bruce-lee-vs-chuck-norris-the-real-truth/#commentsWed, 01 Jan 2014 19:41:15 +0000http://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/?p=432]]>Here’s a fantastic way to start 2014; definitively answering the decades-old question, who would have won in a real fight between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris?

Of course, the more astute martial artists among this blog’s readers will already be certain of the correct answer. But let’s go through the reasoning nonetheless.

In order to answer this question accurately, just as with any question, we will first have to frame the issue accurately:

Framing!

Point 1: When answering any question about “who would win in a real fight between x & y”, one can only answer with a probable outcome. It’s a fact that on any given day, any fighter could in theory be defeated by any opponent, regardless of deficits in skill-level. However, we can say with some confidence that fighter “x”, with a much higher skill level, would defeat fighter “y”, the vast majority of the time. We could express this by opining that fighter “x” might win say… nine times out of ten.

As an example, we could never say that fighter “x” would win ten times out of ten and maintain any intellectual credibility, even if fighter “x” was Georges St-Pierre and fighter “y” was your eighty-year-old mum. We could say that GSP would prevail 99.9995% of the time, though. After all, even GSP could- in theory- be knocked out by a heavy handbag strike to the jawline, one time in every ten-thousand.

Point 2: We must compare like for like. There is no use comparing a young Bruce Lee to an old Chuck Norris, for instance. In the case of Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris, this is easy, as they both hit their “primes” roughly at the same time, in the late nineteen-sixties to early seventies. By this time Norris was at his most successful stage as a Karate competitor, and Lee had amassed most of his Martial Arts experience, just before his untimely death in 1973.

Fight!

Let’s get down to business and compare the two combatants’ actual records and skill levels.

– From nineteen-sixty-eight to nineteen-seventy-four, Norris was by his own declaration a “world middleweight karate champion”. This is taking Norris entirely at his word, mind you. Others have had difficulty in verifying his story on this point. But what all informed commentators agree on is the fact that Norris was competing in point karate, rather than in full-contact Karate. In other words, Norris was a champion in a style of Karate in which you could be penalised for hitting someone with full force. To my way of thinking, this is no different to being declared a champion of doing Kata; while it may be a rewarding pursuit for other reasons, say… fitness and health reasons, it tells you nothing about whether the champion in question can actually fight.

A person who competes in point karate might be able to fight, or he/she might not… you- and they- will never know until they actually fight for real. I hate to skim close to perpetrating a fallacious appeal to authority, but it’s worth examining why fighters like Joe Lewis agree with me on this point:

“They called point tournaments fighting but how can you fight without contact? I’ve worked on my midsection all my life so I could take a punch or kick. Then I go to a tournament and my opponent might be 150 pounds but if he hits me in the midsection he gets a point for a killing blow. That’s nonsense.”
– Joe Lewis (link)

– To contrast this, Bruce Lee’s only commonly accepted contact with competitive fighting was in his adolescence; he was an amateur boxer. Some assert that he won a local-level Hong Kong boxing championship title at that time… but this is impossible to truly verify to a nicety, as local records for the period are scarce to non-existent. For me, it is sufficient to know that Lee probably competed in a full-contact arena, with some success, more than once. After all, a single full-contact boxing match tells you more about a person’s ability to actually fight than any number of non-contact competitions could, whether they allow kicking or not.

“One of the things that made him [Lee] unique was his ability to move from kicking range to punching range to trapping range to grappling range. At that time, most martial artists really shined in one particular range. If you kicked, you didn’t punch or grapple much. If you punched, you didn’t kick or grapple much. And if you grappled, you didn’t have the same skill level in striking. Sifu Bruce was way ahead of his time in how he was training himself and his students to be adept at bridging the gap between ranges.”- Dan Inosanto (link)

– To contrast, while Chuck Norris did study Judo when he was in the armed forces, though far less intensively than he studied Tae Kwan Do, he apparently only gave serious thought to studying submission grappling in 1982, when he first encountered the Gracie family in Brazil.

– In terms of physical attributes and conditioning, reports indicate that Bruce Lee was 5’7″ and weighed as little as 135lb, whereas Norris was 5’10” and weighed 160lb during his competitive career. Norris would have enjoyed both a weight and reach advantage over his smaller adversary. However, Lee was famous for innovating new training methods and conditioning himself physically to a level associated only with top athletes. From two-finger pushups to a ridiculous degree of static strength, Lee seems to have exemplified a philosophy of training which was well ahead of its time. No similar stories concerning Norris have surfaced.

The Outcome:

Essentially, what we have here is a fight between the following two men:

Lee, a combatant who had trained in striking styles all his life, and had success in striking at a full-contact competitive level (albeit a small amateur level), who also studied submission grappling with one of the godfathers of the art, who had an affinity for blending his stand-up and grappling styles in a way that was ahead of his time, and had trained his body to a level commensurate with high-level athletic ability. Lee could have weighed anywhere between 135lb and 145lb (61.2kg to 65.8kg) during 1972.

Norris, a man who had- at the point at which Lee and he met- only focussed on Tae Kwon Do/Karate with a small sideline in Judo, but apparently had limited knowledge of submission grappling and had only ever competed in point karate tournaments. As far as one can tell, Norris weighed 160lb/72.5kg.

It’s hard to argue that either man was really a “competitive fighter”. Both were predominantly performers. But Bruce Lee came closer to this than Norris did. Lee was also the better rounded martial artist, and while Norris did catch up by learning submission grappling eventually, this was only in the eighties or nineties, well after his prime.

If MMA competition- especially in the early days of the UFC- taught us anything, it was that the better rounded fighter- preferably with a knowledge of full-contact striking and submission grappling- will defeat a relatively one-dimensional opponent, even when there is a disparity in weight.

On the basis of this information, I suggest that an actual fight between these two men might go very roughly the same way as the fictional fight scene they played out in the movie Way of the Dragon. I suggest that three quarters of the time, Lee would either survive or be dominant in the striking range, due to his superior speed, timing, physical conditioning and full-contact experience, and would eventually finish the fight via submission.

And the only reason I see Norris winning 2.5 times out of ten, is his greater size and reach.

Potential Counter-Arguments

Supporters of Norris have raised counter-arguments to suggestions that Lee was the better fighter in the past. Some of the most common are:

1. “But Norris was a world champ! Lee never won a championship!”

Well leaving aside Lee’s difficult to verify amateur boxing tournament, this has no relevance as Norris was only ever a champion of pretending to hit people.

2. “Norris was a full-contact Karate fighter, he would have crucified Lee with his kickboxing!”

Norris never competed in full-contact Karate, only in point Karate. Norris often refers to himself as having been a “professional fighter”. If what he was competing in wasn’t fighting (and it wasn’t), how can fighting have been a profession for him? He wasn’t a fighter at all, in fact. Merely a stylist, or a performer. Take your pick.

3. “Lee was tiny! Therefore, Chuck!”

Lee was much smaller. But whether Lee would have won depends on whether his skill and strength was in excess of Norris’ to the degree necessary to overcome that weight and reach disparity. My verdict on the available evidence is that Lee’s skill and strength would have been sufficient to that task, the majority of the time.

There’s no evidence that Chuck had any real fights either. Therefore the two should be assessed on their apparent skills and attributes, as I have assessed them above.

Why Have I Written This?

I admit that the topic at hand may seem somewhat childish, perhaps on the level of “which would win, a scorpion or a spider?”, and by its nature consists of a certain degree of conjecture. But in all honesty, this article was provoked only and entirely by this clip:

A clip in which Norris discusses times that he and Bruce Lee- supposedly a friend of his- worked out together, and is asked by the interviewer:

“[During these workouts you and Bruce Lee were] not fighting each other?”

And Norris responds with:

“No, you know, I was a professional fighter. Haha.”

As if to suggest that Norris was a fighter and Lee was not. Norris’ only concession to Lee’s combative skill comes straight afterwards, when he points out that- while Lee may not have been on Norris’ level as a “fighter”-;

“Here’s what I really think about the theory of evolution: It’s not real. It is not the way we got here. In fact, the life you see on this planet is really just a list of creatures God has allowed to live.”
– Chuck Norris (link)

The plain fact of the matter though, is that Bruce Lee is an inspiration to millions, and his impact can be felt in the way that martial arts are practiced in a more combative and practical way these days, to the way that action is filmed in movies, to the way that Asian men and women are no longer portrayed only as dishwashers and rickshaw drivers in film. He’s won the moral battle against people like Chuck Norris, who despite the appearance of philanthropy, are actually peddling exceptionalism, nationalism, exclusionism and martial fakery to the masses.

Bruce Lee was more moral than Chuck Norris, more intelligent than Chuck Norris, had a better real fighting record than Chuck Norris (the little there was of it), and frankly could have beat Chuck Norris in a fight. My money would have been on him.

End of story.

]]>https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/bruce-lee-vs-chuck-norris-the-real-truth/feed/90withoutwritingBruce Lee-vs-Chuck Norrisbl2bl3Empty Force and Empty Promiseshttps://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/empty-force-and-empty-promises/
https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/empty-force-and-empty-promises/#commentsFri, 20 Dec 2013 15:12:02 +0000http://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/?p=405]]>Another exposé of no-touch knockout bullcrap has been doing the rounds. In this one, a wonderful group of skeptics attended an “open seminar” by a Finnish pseudo-martial artist named Jukka Lampila.

Those courageous skeptical fool-smokers really did a number on him, specifically by asking a set of very basic questions, by not flinging themselves in the direction of his pats, wafts, prods and pokes and generally not being willing accomplices to his cultish buffoonery.

I could spend the entirety of this post taunting his poor, misguided followers that leap into the air and fling themselves on the floor at the slightest provocation, and metaphorically shaking my head in disbelief that he’s probably still teaching the same nonsense back home, even after this very public experience. But this would not be the best use of anyone’s time, and I’ve already done it so often in the past relating to similar incidents, that it would be redundant.

Instead I’d like to take the opportunity to address two points.

Point 1:

These Empty Force bods may be very obvious in their leapy, flingy nonsense, but in reality they are no worse than virtually all Aikido schools, the overwhelming majority of Karate, Kung Fu and Tae Kwon Do schools, the majority of Systema and Krav Maga schools and many other so-called reality-based self-defence schools… in fact, the vast majority of all schools that claim to teach martial arts.

Empty Force is the same as Watanabe Aikido:

But Watanabe Aikido is the same as the more common Aikido: (they may actually touch each other, but not enough or in the right way to cause or warrant this kind of acrobatic tomfoolery)

But Aikido is the same as this type of Karate (“I coulda hit you if I really wanted to!!!”):

Which is the same as this kind of “killer kommando” Systema training:

Why do I say that all these apparently disparate things are the same? Because of the compliant nature of the training, omnipresent mystical drivel, and the fact that the practice never ever becomes significantly less compliant over time.

Martial arts 101:

– In a real martial art one practices a technique which has been proven to work on a resisting, non-compliant opponent.

– One may start to learn this technique in a compliant way, just to get used to the order of the movements, but one should as quickly as possible progress to being more and more resistant and realistic with one’s partner, until one is almost sparring with them in a focussed and limited way.

– One should then progress to actual fully resisting, uncooperative sparring, with no techniques prohibited, and attempt to employ or integrate the technique one just practiced in the most realistic safe environment possible.

– If you want to be really close to realistic, add extra stress factors where possible, e,g: Restricted vision, more than one opponent, training weapons, people screaming obscenities at you from the sidelines, people hitting you with foam shield pads when you least expect it… etc.

If you’re not doing this sort of thing, at least to some extent… you will have A: no idea whether your techniques are likely to work against someone who is really trying to harm you, and B: Virtually no chance of performing even an intrinsically GOOD technique when you need to, because you will not have trained it at the speed at- or in the kind of stressful environment in- you will be required to use it.

In this clip, some dreadful Karate no-hopers exemplify a few tendencies you’ll see in all bad martial arts practice, such as compliant inaction on the part of the “attacker”, unworkably flashy and mechanically inefficient techniques, and ponytails.

And to contrast in this clip former UFC welterweight challenger Jon Fitch demonstrates what an alternative training philosophy might look like. Bear in mind the key difference is resistance, not the tools employed. There is no striking in the Fitch clip, whereas in real life there would be… but even so it is many orders of magnitude more realistic- and more beneficial to its participants- than the Karate klip.

Point 2:

Instead of merely laughing at deluded people, we should see something like the above clip and then take a long and hard look at ourselves.

We must ask ourselves: How do we know that what we think is real and true is actually real, or true? Whether we believe that there were WMDs in Iraq; or whether we think that eating lots of citrus fruits will protect us from the common cold; or whether we believe that magic special shakey water (homeopathy) will cure our ills; or whether we believe that our Karate will work against a drugged up gangbanger trying to carjack us… We all have some false beliefs. Even a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic like myself. Buddhists might argue- correctly in my view- that our very perception of our self and our own existence is based upon a set of delusions.

Well as martial artists,.. heck, as a species, it’s time to take a look inwards, and decide what we want to be our method of telling truth from falsehood.

I suggest that hard evidence should be our guide. And the skill of being able to weigh evidence is not a natural skill we’re born with, it requires hard work. In fact, it requires as much hard work as learning to punch or kick or throw or lock or strangle properly, and it’s arguably more important as a skill for martial artists than any of those things.

GSP seems to be happy that he’s left the sport… but he may have been happier if he’d never gotten into it in the first place.

Most people au fait with the martial arts will be aware that Georges St-Pierre, a man who could legitimately be called the greatest pound-for-pound martial artist the world has ever seen, has vacated his world title– a title which he has held and defended against all comers for the best part of six years- and has taken an indefinite leave of absence from the sport of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).

Naturally, most of the coverage of this significant event in the sport revolves around a discussion of his legacy, with some folks speculating that the closeness of his recent fights has led him to give up, due to his competition catching up uncomfortably close behind him. Others are wondering how his effective retirement will impact the box office for MMA globally; St-Pierre has been the biggest draw in the sport for some time, after all.

But- of course, and as ever- this is a sideshow to the real discussion that people should be having. The issue is not whether St-Pierre should leave the sport; the question is not how his departure will affect the sport… in fact the more pertinent point of discussion is: whether he should ever have gotten involved with the sport in the first place… and for that matter, whether anyone should.

GSP is a nearly peerless all-round athlete who has mastered all the hyper-complex core disciplines of human unarmed combat, who has been on the cutting edge of technical advances in combat tactics and training for the past decade, and who fights with a technical expertise and intelligence nearly unheard of in human history. Put any fighter from history up against GSP with few or no rules, and he would undoubtedly prevail. Only the heavier fighters from the current crop of GSP’s contemporaries would stand a chance of defeating him. In fact, he’s a man who is blessed with so many natural gifts, (natural intelligence, adaptability, physical capability) it’s arguable that he could succeed in virtually any field.

He should have tried another field. Combat sports were not the right decision for GSP. They were not the smart decision. GSP may have succeeded in his sport… but even with his exceptional skill, he could very easily have failed. Virtually nobody who tries to make a living in sports succeeds.

To demonstrate this, let’s take the USA as an example, since they have one of the most sports-based cultures in the world: In the USA, if you play a sport at the college level, you’re already in the upper echelons of the talent pool, a very rarified group indeed.

Well it’s estimated that just over one out of every hundred college sportsmen (with the exception of those playing baseball, where the estimate is just over one in ten) ends up playing their sport professionally. So suppose you’re great at your sport in school, and then you make it into the even more challenging college level… after this point you STILL have to be in the top one percent of your peer group to make it any further, and to make any kind of money at all at your sport.

Let’s say you’re really one in a hundred in an already unbelievably competitive environment. Let’s say you get an actual job doing your chosen sport for a living. Well of those sports people who manage to break into the rarified strata of the professional level, few keep the money they make. It’s been estimated that in the USA, eight out of ten American Football players end up bankrupt after their lucrative career finishes. Six out of ten basketball players have no money left after ending their playing careers. Part of this is due to the fact that sports people have spent their youth working to become better at their sport, and NOT learning how to handle money or business deals, but part of it is the professional sports environment itself; managers, trainers, promoters and other sundry hangers-on all demand their respective fees, and the sports person themself is often unaware of how little remains of their winnings after their dues are paid.

Then you have the brevity of even a “successful” sporting career. Let’s say that someone becomes a chef. Well a chef can do that job until retirement age, or even further in some cases. Let’s say someone decides to become a lawyer. Well, their earnings will increase exponentially throughout their life, and they’ll have the opportunity to be well-off in their old age. How about becoming an electrician or a plumber? Well there might be fluctuations in available work, but there will always be wires and pipes that need fixing. But a sports person? Most sports careers are over when the athlete is still in their early thirties. A successful athlete in his or her forties is so rare it’s remarked upon in awed tones by commentators. Athletes in their fifties still competing? One can count them on one or two hands, worldwide. So let’s say you’re that one-in-a-hundred-thousand person who gets into pro-sports and you don’t blow all the cash you’re earning on fast cars and expensive champagne. You’ll still only have a few scant years to save up enough money to live off for the rest of your life. Because guess what? If your sports career ends, you’ll be relatively unqualified for any other job.

And how about injury? Sports careers cause injuries, and those careers are ended by unforeseen injuries every day of the week, as so nearly happened to GSP himself when he tore his ACL. If a chef breaks his or her leg badly (which she or he is statistically unlikely to do) they can take a break to heal up and then resume their chosen work. If an athlete breaks their leg badly (which they are statistically more likely to do because of their very physical job), they will have to take a long recovery period normally without earning any money, and then face the strong possibility that they will never be able to do their chosen work ever again.

So let’s do some crude maths. Suppose you look at a group of one thousand excellent young athletes who have been good enough to reach the college level of their sport, and think they might be in with a shot at making some money fighting, or hitting balls with sticks, or whatever.

Well nine-hundred-and-ninety of those young athletes won’t ever make it into the professional arena. Of the ten who remain to have an actual career, six to eight will have lost all the money they make a scant few years after they leave the sport.

So of a pool of already very skilled athletes, that’s two in a thousand that will make any money in the long run out of their skills. That’s one in every five hundred already elite athletes. And even fewer will ever get rich doing their sport. After all, Georges St-Pierre is unusually rich even among other successful, financially solvent athletes.

So do you think you’re that good? The best person in a group of five-hundred people? Do you think you’re that lucky? The luckiest person in a group of five-hundred people, all similarly skilled and with a similar athletic work ethic to you? Play the odds, fella.

The media wants us to aspire to be like successful footballers, tennis players and fighters. But the fact of the matter is that a vanishingly small number of people can be successful sportspeople at any one time. Effectively, if you try, you will fail. And of course, though they’re very nice people by and large, professional athletes don’t contribute much that is of use to society. They’re not doctors or scientists or writers or thinkers or political activists. Society doesn’t want us to aspire to be these more mundane things, even though you’ll help the human race out a hell of a lot more if you’re a scientist than if you’re a football player. And frankly you’re more likely to be a successful scientist than a successful football player.

So ask yourself why society is structured this way. Could it be because a society made up of people scrabbling to achieve an unobtainable and essentially futile goal is easier to control and manipulate than a society made up of highly educated, financially conscious professionals? Just a thought.

Lastly, the worst possible sport one can get into is a sport involving repeated impact trauma to the brain, like boxing or MMA. Because research is now showing that even minor regular impact to the cranium can and does lead to tragic long term physical and mental health effects and personality changes. And this kind of injury is unavoidable in any of the above sports, if you have a long career. In other words, if you’re one of the tiny number of very very rare and very very lucky people who succeed in fighting sports and have a long, successful career, your very success will mean that you’re nearly guaranteed to sustain tangible brain damage.

It’s worth mentioning that another- albeit less high-profile- Canadian UFC fighter named Nick Denis retired after reading the research on sub-concussive brain injury in sportspeople. He discusses his reasoning here and here. It’s persuasive stuff.

Georges St-Pierre has left the game on top. But the odds of him ever making it to the top were microscopically tiny, despite his skills. He could have had as little as a couple more bad nights early on and his career could have gone in a completely different direction. And he was intelligent enough to realise this to some extent… he has stated that he finished his stint at college while pursuing a fighting career just in case his sporting career didn’t pan out. But despite this smidgeon of foresight he’s still at risk of suffering the effects of brain injury long-term because of his career choice.

“Stay in school and use your brain. Be a doctor, be a lawyer, carry a leather briefcase. Forget about sports as a profession. Sports make ya grunt and smell. See, be a thinker, not a stinker.”

The character of Rocky Balboa also touched on the idea in the same movie, with:

“You gotta be a moron… you gotta be a *moron* to wanna be a fighter.”

and that could go for sportspeople in general… but especially fighters. Not because they are actual morons, but because society is encouraging them to aspire to a goal which can- realistically speaking- only damage them… and they’re allowing their capacity for ego and self-delusion to carry them along on this ruinous path.

Georges St-Pierre has indeed made the right decision in not being part of the sporting world, but twelve years too late. He- and every other person considering a career in the high-risk, low return arena of professional sports- should learn the following lesson from the case of “Rush” St-Pierre: Don’t even try. If your dream is to be the next Georges St-Pierre, you’re better off ignoring the brief period of his life where he was paid to get punched in- and to punch people in- the head, and merely follow in his footsteps by doing what he’s doing right NOW:

NOT BEING A PROFESSIONAL ATHLETE.

]]>https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/georges-st-pierre-right-decision-but-late/feed/4withoutwritingGSP seems to be happy that he's left the sport... but he may have been happier if he'd never gotten into it in the first place.On Remembrance Sunday… What Should We Remember?https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/what-should-we-remember/
https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/what-should-we-remember/#respondMon, 04 Nov 2013 19:30:34 +0000http://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/?p=380]]>It is that time of year again: the week of Remembrance Sunday. This is when the denizens of the UK turn out on to the streets to commemorate the British soldiers who have died in war. Those familiar with my blog will be unsurprised to discover that I find the commemoration of only British dead; or only deceased soldiers; or even only deceased British soldiers, to be- if done in isolation and without equal consideration of the civilian dead or even the dead of our official enemies- to be manifestly ridiculous and in fact immoral.

I’ll therefore be wearing a White Poppy aka. the “Peace Poppy” this week, instead of a red one. The White Poppy was first produced en masse in the 1930s, when the manufacturers of the red poppy refused to put a message of peace on their flowers.

Here’s some reasons why I’ll be wearing one, and why you should too:

1. The red poppy is a fundraising tool of the British Legion, a charitable organisation that raises money for British servicemen/women. Correct me if my reasoning is faulty, but shouldn’t the government that sends young men and women to war for illegal and immoral reasons at least foot the TOTAL bill for their care once they’ve come home injured or traumatized? Why should the public pay even more money out in the poppy appeal to make up for the deficiencies in the paltry government compensation schemes for ex armed forces personnel? Answer: they shouldn’t. In my opinion the British Legion shouldn’t have to exist: the government should be doing the job that they’re doing. And donating to the British Legion merely encourages this state of affairs. Meanwhile our politicians all wear red poppies and bow their heads at memorial services, while plotting ways to send young men and women to die so that their friends and allies can make money.

The white poppy on the other hand is produced and sold by peace campaigning organisations, and the money donated to these organisations is spent on campaigns for peace, and against war. More worthy.

2. The majority of the victims of war aren’t the British soldiers, who, like all soldiers, are human instruments of killing. The bulk of the victims are the civilians who are butchered by the thousands and millions in the illegal and immoral wars we’ve been waging since time immemorial. You could argue, I suppose, that WWII was not an immoral war, and while it was indeed moral to try to stop the Nazis in their butchering of innocents, that wasn’t the main reason that our government decided to go to war in that case, nor in any other case. Wars are fought for political, territorial and financial reasons, rarely if ever for moral reasons. The red poppy therefore glorifies war by omission; by only commemorating the British military dead, it deliberately minimizes the impact on all the innocent people whom our nation has slaughtered, and whom other nations have slaughtered.

The white poppy specifically commemorates all the victims of war, whether they were from our nation or any other nation. More worthy.

3. The military poppy is mercilessly used as a propaganda tool by the right-wing establishment to plug the idea that soldiers are heroes by default, and if you’re a soldier that has died while fighting “for your country” (actually for your government, not your country) you’re a hero. That’s wrong. Soldiers are not necessarily heroic, and killing someone your government has told you to kill for political reasons doesn’t make you a hero, and doesn’t mean you’re fighting for the interests of the people who actually populate your home nation. If a soldier saves some civilians from a burning house, that soldier can be called a hero. But killing Afghan people? Bombing Iraqis? Even dying in a hail of gunfire while shooting bullets at Iraqi fighters, whose nation has been illegally invaded by the west? None of those things are heroic. Rather, they are villainous.

The white poppy is not a glorification of military bombast, mass-killing and misplaced national pride. More worthy.

You are not your nation. You are not your government. You are an individual, and an individual has a responsibility to be moral. If you want to help soldiers, then help the soldiers of the future by working to prevent future wars of aggression and rapacious imperialism. Wear a white poppy, at the very least.

My first post on this topic examined how one’s ego can drive one into potentially violent situations for no good reason. Hopefully anyone who reads these posts will have the strength of character to recognise their own ego in some of the examples given, and strive to bring it further under the control of their better nature. Because we are all controlled by our ego at times, and our best defence (as is the case across the board) is an awareness that this is happening.

However, the ego has many faces, and bleeds into one’s life with great subtlety and wearing many insidious disguises. In this post I shall examine some of the less obvious ways that one’s ego can interfere with one’s pursuit of safety and security, and look at the consequences of leaving it to run unchecked.

How can one be fully aware of one’s own ego, when the ego’s raison-d’etre is to conceal itself?

* * *

So you’re not the type of person to talk your way into a fight, you’ve never been grossly inconsiderate of others on public transport and you’re more than willing to give up your right of way to avoid potential conflicts with others. Great! You must be without ego then, Right?

WRONG!

Do you enjoy driving your car very fast? Use your mobile phone while driving, even on a hands-free? Perhaps you drink alcohol before driving? Drink to excess at all? Do you smoke tobacco or other recreational narcotics? Do you ride your bicycle along busy main roads? Do you eat unhealthily? Do you practice unsafe sex?

If any of the above are true of you, don’t take this as some kind of negative accusation; we all have flaws. And these are flawed behaviours and beliefs, demonstrably so. They will all increase your odds of injury or death. But because you yourself engage in these practices, their flawed nature is concealed from you by default.

Ah, if only every flawed individual was wandering around fully consciously aware of his or her flaws. Because then they might at least have a chance of correcting those flaws. But the most insidious flaws hide themselves from us in this way: personal flaws, unnecessarily risky behaviours and false beliefs can be universally traced back to a point at which one made a decision based solely on ego, and not on any facts or evidence available to one at the time. And the ego protects itself from all attacks… even when the attacker is one’s own common sense.

Here in my car…

Let’s take the first example on the list of flaws above, an uncontroversial one. Let’s suppose that someone occasionally enjoys going fast in their car. Many do. But why do they enjoy it? Merely the rush of going fast? The feeling of having a powerful machine at their control? Well, okay, but does that sensation really outweigh the risk? In fact, is that sensation really worth even a tiny fraction of the risk of death, disability or financial ruin that can result from a car accident?

Of course not. And it’s a serious risk. For various political reasons, right-wing activists often claim that excessive speed is an insignificant factor, or only causes a handful of accidents. But in fact, the available data from US (source 1, 2) and UK sources (source 1, 2) shows that driving too fast for the conditions at hand- whether illegal or legal- is a contributing facter in a quarter to a third of fatal auto accidents. And even if your speed had nothing to do with how the accident was caused, the result of the accident could be much worse than it would otherwise have been had you not been travelling as fast. e.g: suppose a child leaps out in front of your car as you’re driving along in a 30mph limit zone, with no warning whatsoever. Well, if you happened to be travelling at 30mph you may injure the child badly, but their chances of survival would be significantly higher than if you were travelling illegally fast at 40mph. A famous advert in the UK starkly elucidated this simple equation.

But an astonishing number of drivers simply ignore 30mph limit signs (if they think they can get away with it). And why? to shave a couple of minutes off their journey time? Perhaps because it just feels so darned slow travelling at 30mph? Are these reasons good enough to outweigh the risks of speeding in urban areas?

No, the real reason that drivers feel justified in speeding is this: They secretly believe that they’re somehow special drivers. Extra-skilled drivers to whom bad things won’t happen, because of their super expert driving skills. Sometimes people believe this so secretly, they don’t even realise it themselves.

You’d keep that in mind at all times when driving a car (which is, let’s face it, a very heavy, fast-moving death machine) if you weren’t being ruled by your ego.

Suh-Mokin’!

Let’s take another example, the smoking example. I’ve mentioned this in the past, but anyone who states anything like “Pah! My granddaddy smoked fifty cigs a day for ninety-five years and never got lung cancer” is living in cloud-cuckoo land, for obvious reasons. It’s not that you’ll contract lung cancer each time you smoke a cigarette. It’s that each cigarette you smoke increases the odds that your lungs will rot.

But WHY are these muppets living in cloud-cuckoo land? Because, secretly, their ego is whispering in their ear: “we’re too special to get lung cancer. we’re the special one and we’ll never die… nor spend years on oxygen from chronic lung disease”. That’s why.

Threaten someone with IMMEDIATE death, e.g: with a gun or with a knife, and they’ll be willing to do anything to save their life. In fact, most people will do anything to claw back even minutes more life, let alone years. But the spectre of eventual disease and death is remote enough that the ego can disguise it from us, and lead us into temptations like nicotine and alcohol.

Get your fix

So how do you make things better? By taking a long, hard look at yourself, that’s how. And it doesn’t even matter so much which method you choose to use; buddhist meditation, a sweat lodge, psychotherapy, keeping a diary, heck, talking to your mum might do it. The point is that the ego is like a vampire. It doesn’t like sunlight; sunlight will kill it.

Try this: When you wake up in the morning, ask yourself why you’re about to do whatever it is that you do in the morning. Do you slap on some makeup? Do your hair? Eat some cereal? Why are you doing what you’re doing? Is there a good reason for doing it? Is it motivated by vanity? Is it the healthy thing to do?

How about when you leave for work (if you work)? Do you cycle or run to work? If not, why not? What’s the reason for taking your car or paying for public transportation? Do you really live so far away from your job that you need to take two buses and a train to get there, when it would be cheaper, healthier and- if you do it right- safer to cycle? Hell, it might even be quicker, once you’ve factored in the bad traffic.

It’s dinner time. Why are you eating that pizza? It costs ten pounds all by itself, and it’s about as wholesome as Andrew Lloyd Webber looks. Seriously, what’s the deal? You know that while all the sugars and empty calories might make you feel good for an hour or so, they’ll depress you later. When you’re on the bathroom scales, for instance.

You can take this further. Much further, and much deeper. You can ask yourself questions like: “Why am I taking my difficult day at work out on my loving wife/husband, when I know that it won’t solve my problems, it won’t make me feel any better and it sure as hell won’t improve the state of my relationship?”

If the martial arts should teach us one lesson and one lesson only, it should be this: If there’s a problem, most of the time one’s own ego is the only real barrier to solving it. That’s true whether you’re talking your way out of a fight on the street, or not ordering that pizza on a boring Tuesday night. It’s all the same.

Admit to yourself that the only sure-fire way to win is to stack the deck in your favour, by doing the most advantageous thing at the right time. That means that you shouldn’t kill yourself by increments. Don’t allow your ego to increase your chances of death, injury or illness at ANY time. Be as ruthless in destroying your own ego as you would be against the most vicious attacker. If you wish to learn to defend yourself, start by learning to defend yourself from yourself.

Then, and only then, you’ll be a real martial artist. Because- in truth- the real enemy is the enemy within.

]]>https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/kill-your-ego-part-2/feed/0withoutwritingThis is the spectre... of EGO!Rape and Self Defence: How to approach the issuehttps://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/rape-and-self-defence-how-to-approach-the-issue/
https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/rape-and-self-defence-how-to-approach-the-issue/#respondFri, 19 Jul 2013 10:52:43 +0000http://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/?p=348]]>Here’s a delicate subject. Perhaps the most delicate, misunderstood, loaded subject one can deal with when discussing self defence. The subject of sexual assaults and rapes. Frankly I doubt my own ability to cleanly delineate the issues involved; they are so many and varied and subtle that no self defence commentator has walked the fine line carefully enough to avoid accusations of victim-blaming on the one hand, or to avoid watering down the self defence advice too much on the other.

I for one know all too well that one can be accused of victim-blaming when discussing less emotive topics like wilderness survival or street-attack avoidance… So it’s very likely I’ll be accused of victim-blaming in this case regardless of how cautiously I proceed. With that in mind, let’s begin.

The issue (in brief)

A primer for those new to the subject: Rape’s a crime that is predominantly but not exclusively committed against women. Children are victims a great deal of the time, and lastly and least commonly, men are also rape victims. Rape therefore tends to be regarded as a “women’s issue”, though some very smart commentators take issue with this classification for various reasons. Suffice it to say, the issue of rape has been of very great concern to women, women’s activist groups and women’s self-defence instructors and commentators for some considerable time.

Here’s the delicate part of the issue: for most of human history, women were regarded as second-class citizens (if citizens at all) and also regarded by religious bods as unclean and generally sinful. When a woman was sexually assaulted, they were blamed for it! In other words, for the majority of human history, women were treated globally the same way that they’re treated now in the developing world (including in some of our state’s favourite client countries).

Now, you may think that we’re more civilized in the developed world these days, but in fact, we’re not much more civilized. Even though women aren’t stoned to death for being raped any more, they are often villified as “asking for it”, and dragged through some offensive questioning by police officers with offensive attitudes before they even get the chance to be interrogated in an aggressive manner in court. In other words, there is still a culture of victim-blaming in our society when it comes to rape.

Just as an aside, it’s interesting to note that this victim-blaming also comes into play when talking about the much ignored minority of adult men who are raped, but for different, yet equally neanderthal reasons. When a woman is raped she is often blamed by part of society for being a “slut” who was “asking for it”. But when a man is raped he is villified by society for “not being strong enough to stop it”. If the man happens to be gay, well, that’s even worse for the poor victim, because society still has an attitude that if you’re gay, you must enjoy having sex with other men, even if that sex is non-consensual. It’s the old “asking for it” mode, translated into a homophobic script.

I’m not sure why the issue of sexual assault specifically brings the cro-magnon out in many idiotic members of society, but it sure does.

The question of Self Defence

Here’s where it gets difficult. As someone who has studied the topic of self defence for a very, very long time (over twenty years, at this point) I have an ability to- and a moral responsibility to- tell people how they can better protect themselves from the dangers posed by other humans. So what about rape? How do I advise people about rape avoidance? After all, avoidance is the core of all good self defence systems. Avoidance is a hot potato when it comes to rape. Why? Well, let’s put it like this:

Women’s self defence groups for the past forty years or so have focussed on rape defence in these terms: A stranger runs out of the bushes/from behind a car/from a dark alleyway and tries to grab you. You kick him in the nuts, stamp on his feet, gouge his eyes, spray him with mace and/or shoot him (if you live in the US) and then run off.

Now that’s all well and good, and I’m not going to go into a fine analysis of whether such tactics are actually effective for the scenario described. Why? Because the scenario is a very rare scenario in the real world. The majority of rapes don’t involve complete strangers leaping out of the bushes and attacking women. The majority of rapes instead involve someone the woman knows or has met in a social situation.

The majority of rapes are committed either in a so-called date rape scenario, or by the woman’s boyfriend or spouse (either current spouse or ex-spouse).

Are there any self-defence classes on these issues? Hardly. Bloody. Any.

Let’s examine these under-discussed factoids.

Scenario one:

The majority of “date-rapes” involve the rapist either plying the woman with alcohol (and sometimes also so-called date-rape drugs in said alcohol)
or following the woman after she’s already very inebriated, giving her a lift to her home (or even to the rapist’s home) and then raping her.

Why do rapists target drunk people? (either people who have gotten drunk themselves, or people whom the rapist has gotten drunk) Well why do pickpockets target drunk people? Why do muggers target drunk people? Why do people looking for a fight target drunk people?

Because drunk people are more vulnerable, less able to defend themselves and less likely to remember enough in the morning to lodge a legal complaint of any weight. A drunk person is easier to separate from their (usually drunk) friends. A drunk person is a dream victim for these people. And the same goes for rapists. Rapists, especially serial rapists, are looking for a method of committing their foul acts that works for them, and furthermore allows them to continue to commit foul acts in the future.

After they sober up, the victim may feel as though they brought the crime upon themselves. Due to the social stigma of sexual issues, rape victims routinely experience irrational feelings of guilt following their terrible experience. How much more likely is someone who was intoxicated at the time to feel guilty? The rapist relies on this feeling of guilt as an extra line of defence, and they know that the courts- middle-aged, over-priveliged and male as they predominantly are- are likely to make the victim feel guilty as well, if it ever comes to court that is. If the victim ever lodges legal charges, the rapist can claim that the sex was consensual, and that the victim merely feels differently now that they’re sober. And the courts may agree, even if they happen to be sympathetic to the victim… after all, in court, guilt has to be proved beyond a certain degree of doubt.

So as a self-defence blogger, what should my advice be to women? How should I advise them to best avoid situations in which they might be raped by acquaintances or people they’ve just met? Well, actually it’s the same advice I’d give to people on avoiding being pickpocketed or avoiding bar-fights.

Don’t drink more than one or two alcoholic drinks on a given night. Period. Ever. And watch your drink like a hawk to make sure nobody puts anything in it.

If you follow this advice, you will cut down your risk of being a victim of ALL crime, by a STAGGERING percentage.

At this point, some activists will be clamouring that I’m blaming the victim; that women have a right to go out and get drunk without being the victim of crime and that I should be focussing my blog post on telling men not to go out and rape people rather than lecturing women on their life-choices.

Let’s address those points right now.

1. I’m not blaming the victim of rape, any more than I’m blaming the victim of pickpocketing. It’s always the criminal’s “fault”. The criminal is always to blame for the crime, 100%.

2. Women have a right to do whatever they want. Women have a right to go skydiving, they have a right to drive racing cars, they have a right to cross the street and they have a right to get drunk, same as anyone else. But there are risks involved in all those things, and rather than being aware of those risks and moderating their behaviour to compensate, many people (not just women) drink to excess and *ignore* the risks, or somehow convince themselves that “it won’t happen to me, I can handle myself”.

This is analogous to people who smoke stating “yeah, I know there are risks, but my granddaddy smoked forty a day till he was ninety and never had a problem!!!”. The flaw in this reasoning should be obvious.

It’s not that you’ll get attacked every time you get drunk, any more than you’ll develop lung cancer every time you have a cigarette. It’s a question of odds. And if you’re drunk, the odds are NOT in your favour.

So yeah, you have a right to smoke. But if I’m advising people on health issues, I say “don’t smoke”. And yeah, you have a right to drink. But if I’m advising people on self defence issues, I say “don’t get drunk”. Seems uncontroversial to me.

3. What I’m about is helping people to avoid the crime, and foil the plans of the criminal. I can’t talk to the criminal and say “hey, don’t commit that crime”. That’s something for social engineers and large scale campaigns in schools. What I can do is offer advice to ordinary non-criminals about how criminals work, and how to make themselves safer.

Scenario Two:

Rapes by partners and ex partners are very common. How can one better defend oneself against such assaults? By avoidance. But how can one avoid abusive relationships? Well, society has kept women in a servile state for the majority of human history… is it any wonder that many women don’t have the ability to escape abusive relationships that beat them down emotionally and often physically every day?

Avoidance in these cases is mainly about support and education. The state has to improve its record of supporting victims of spousal abuse in order to make future victims feel comfortable in coming forward early on in the cycle of violence. Society must change in order to help women set personal boundaries and increase their sense of self-worth and their self-confidence.

The only advice that can be given to individuals is: To anyone who feels as though they’re at risk of violence from their partner, either current or ex-partner, whether the violence is sexual or physical… Get out of the relationship, get friends and family involved, inform the police, and do it earlier rather than later. Don’t speak to or deal with the person in question directly, no matter how apologetic they are or how much they claim they’re going to change. Cut them off totally, but do so in a way that you’ll be safe from physical reprisals… Remember the most dangerous time for abused women is when they’ve ended the abusive relationship. The ex-partner is most likely to be lethally violent at this time. Research across the board has suggested this (though it’s worth noting that the question can be nebulous).

]]>https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/rape-and-self-defence-how-to-approach-the-issue/feed/0withoutwritinguntitledChomsky vs… the “Brave New World” of the Behaviouristshttps://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/chomsky-vs-the-brave-new-world-of-the-behaviourists/
https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/chomsky-vs-the-brave-new-world-of-the-behaviourists/#commentsSun, 12 May 2013 22:35:46 +0000http://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/?p=338]]>

Cover illustration for A Brave New World, used without permission

As perhaps the greatest exponent of intellectual self-defence in the world for the past fifty years, Noam Chomsky holds a special place in the hearts and minds of those who truly wish to escape the modern version of the net of psychological manipulation that has been cast over the minds of mankind by the wealthy and powerful since the dawn of civilisation.

Like any great martial artist, (albeit an intellectual martial artist in his case) Chomsky has a laundry list of victories over foes that apparently overmatch him. Periodically I will explore some of Chomsky’s greatest battles, and analyse his keys to victory.

Unlike the physical techniques of an Anderson Silva however, Chomsky’s techniques cannot be used both for good and for evil; they can only be used for good: They are only useful for uncovering the truth and promoting peace between others. This is worth bearing in mind.

Chomsky vs… the “Brave New World” of the Behaviourists

There were several very influential dystopian novels written in the twentieth century. Most people will have heard of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell, which- thematically- dealt primarily with how a right-wing society might attempt to exert thought-control on a population by changing the way they use language, maintaining the fiction of continuous war, and promoting the belief in an authoritarian panopticon… “Big brother is watching you”, wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing.

Then there was Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The title being a reference to the temperature at which paper burns. The main theme of this dystopian classic is generally understood to be an exploration of censorship, and its dangers. In the future America envisioned by Bradbury, all books are burned as a matter of state policy; no written material is allowed, mass-media imagery is all that the population consumes.

Both of these books were descriptions of what was happening at the time they were written; Orwell was commenting on events in his own society and other societies in 1949… In England and the US, the Ministries of War had just been renamed to “Ministries of Defence”, in order to make them sound less warmongering than they clearly were, and the “public relations” industry, led- at least as a figurehead- by that most evil of men Edward Bernays, had been on a spectacular run of population-fooling shennanigans for some time. Bradbury was writing at a time when McCarthyism had been rife, and had ruined the careers… and lives… of many innocent progressives. A time when ideas themselves were made illegal.

But while these works were indeed topical, it is worth noting that such social issues have been with us for a long time, and had been reflected in dystopian fiction before. The oldest- and most influential- examples of these were The Iron Heel by Jack London, published in 1908, and We by Yevgeny Zamyati, published in 1921, which influenced Orwell and Huxley to a great degree.

Noam Chomsky has a genius-level intellect, and a degree of psychological toughness that exceeds that of any fighter. Image used without permission.

The last of the major dystopian novels I’ll mention today however, dealt with similar issues with perhaps more recognisably sci-fi devices. A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley was published in 1932 (and owed a great deal to the novels that preceded it). It described a future dystopia in which all children were artificially grown and their physical and mental development controlled entirely by a powerful and priveliged ruling elite. It described a world in which the working class were bred- and their brains deliberately damaged- so that they would remain servile and unable ever to rebel. It described a world in which all social classes were brainwashed from a very early age to enjoy pointless decadence and futile games, preventing their ability to think deeply on any topic, and therefore their ability to cause any trouble to the established order of authority and hierarchy.

In other words, it described the world that politically motivated followers of B.F Skinner and his “Radical” Behaviourism tried to make a reality.

in 1957 B.F. Skinner published a book called “Verbal Behaviour”, in which the Harvard-based psychologist put forward the idea that children learn language merely through stimulus and response. Skinner’s ideas owed a great debt to Pavlov and his famous canine experiments; Skinner and his behaviourist contemporaries believed- and wished to convince others- that human beings were effectively Pavlov’s dogs; that they learned only through stimulus and response, and were plastic, malleable creatures who could in theory be conditioned to do, learn or accept anything.

To a lay person Skinner himself appears to have been merely a verbose oddball; he was either unaware of, or indifferent to, the deep and obvious flaws in his perspective and/or concepts, and the dark political implications of his ideas. But ideas like Skinner’s were beloved by the rich and powerful, because such ideas gave their immoral exploitation of the poor, weak and vulnerable a kind of moral imprimatur that they had not possessed since “divine right” became old-hat.

After all, if people were simply malleable creatures who could be trained to do anything and trained to accept anything, what was immoral about leaving them in poverty, or making them engage in nothing but the drudgery demanded by higher society? The rich had always had a suspicion that the poor would be happier if they simply accepted their lot in life… and if a famous psychologist from Harvard agreed with their elitist convictions, so much the better.

Already a powerful mind and a lifelong social activist, the young MIT Lingustics professor named Noam Chomsky did see the stark implications, and wrote a response; a scathing critique of Skinner’s ideas.

Chomsky knocked down point after point that Skinner had raised, and at the end of the piece he used simple common sense; he pointed out the simple fact that if we were- as Skinner’s ideas implied- merely a blank slate at birth, we would each have to exist for far longer than the lifespan of a human being before we mastered even the simplest of human languages.

In other words, we must have the core rules of all human language hard-wired into us, or we would simply not have time during our lives to amass the evidence necessary to comprehend an ultra-complex function like human verbal communication. Therefore we do not learn language in terms of stimulus and response, but instead learn language in the same way that a plant grows a flower; the flower needs some external components to fuel its growth, yes (e.g: light and water) but the form it takes is almost entirely pre-destined, and has little to do with “stimulus and response”.

When demolishing Skinner’s more ludicrous ideas, Chomsky also heralded the death of behaviourism as an intellectually defensible strand of psychology. Since then behaviourism has been shunned by the main stream of psychological research.

The importance of this victory cannot be overstated. Chomsky is one man, and in one article he succeeded in wiping out a cancerous strand of the cognitive sciences that was most beloved by the rich and powerful, and was strongly defended by them.

Sadly, in certain areas of life, behaviourism did not die out. For instance Skinner’s behaviourist ideas led to the creation of something nowadays called Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) Therapy, a “therapy” of punishment and reward. This was originally used in attempts to “cure homosexuality”, and to train autistic children out of their “undesirable” behaviours. Its older name is less shiny: “Behaviour Modification”. A quack therapy of the most insidious kind, this remains with us today, and because autistic people have very few advocates and often little ability or opportunity to speak out against mistreatment, it is likely to remain for some time.

In addition, businesses still treat their staff as if they are ultimately clay creatures, malleable and entirely mouldable. Governments, the public-relations arm of big business, have increasingly started treating their populations as if they are Pavlov’s dogs. We live in the society that Aldous Huxley described in A Brave New World, a society in which people yearn for transient pleasures and fruitless sensual diversions, a society in which- paradoxically- every class looks down on every other, a society in which the poor are disadvantaged with poor education and poor healthcare until they are almost physically unable to rebel against rapacious power.

But people are more than automatons; more than Pavlov’s dogs. Amazingly, Noam Chomsky won one battle for us virtually all by himself, and saved the sciences from a morally disturbing black hole into which they were being drawn in the 1950s. But the war rages on, and it’s up to the rest of us to prevent the dawn of a brave new world.

]]>https://withoutwriting.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/chomsky-vs-the-brave-new-world-of-the-behaviourists/feed/2withoutwritingIllustration by someone named Byrd, used without permissionNoam Chomsky has a genius-level intellect, and a degree of psychological toughness that exceeds that of any fighter.